Stuart W. Mirsky
I gave up reading the New York Times after getting fed up with its biased reporting and the blatant editorializing in its news pages as seen in the late eighties and early nineties when the Times did everything it could to bring down the Reagan presidency and demolish the presidency of the elder Bush. In essence the newspaper seemed to be out to destroy Republicans and exalt Democrats, journalistic standards of objectivity notwithstanding.
Yet in the run-up to this most recent presidential election I found myself reading the Times again, partly because a Facebook correspondent called me out on disparaging its recent coverage when I was no longer a regular reader and partly because a neighbor asked me to take her paper in while she’s away. (I certainly wasn’t about to start buying it again until I could be convinced that they had become a fairer media outlet but this confluence of circumstances prompted me to have another look.) A recent Sunday edition just prior to the election made the familiar case against Donald Trump, the GOP candidate, and for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The case against now President-Elect Trump struck me as having much to recommend it. I was no fan of the GOP candidate, after all. Yet the editorial writers did a great deal more than make it. In their usual excess (reminding me of the bad old days in which I had abandoned reading that paper) they turned their bitterest guns on the Republican Party itself.
After what read like a perfunctory nod to those Republicans who had consistently opposed Trump, they proceeded to launch into a savage attack on Republicans in general. Referring to the Trump-Clinton six month long conretemps, they wrote:“This surreal, miserable presidential campaign exposed a lot of rot in our democracy’s infrastructure, and . . . a sick Republican Party.” My antennas went up immediately as I read on. “Some in the never-Trump movement tried and failed to stop the nominee. But history will not be kind to the other Republicans who, out of cravenness or calculation, sidled up to a man they knew to be unfit for office. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio – weaklings all. A party of holier-than-thous standing athwart history, saying, ‘Stop Hillary, whatever the damage’.” In retrospect, of course, that decision to stay with Trump, despite his rhetorical excesses, and they were legion, don’t look quite so bad, after all. Still this incessant demeaning of Republicans is red meat to many on the left and that Times editorial helps explain why so many liberals have come to feel this way.
The Times sets the tone for many on the political left by exuding its own deep dislike of people who think differently than they do. The paper’s editorial writers just can’t seem to help themselves, disparaging a man like Paul Ryan, for instance, who was obviously caught between the rock of party loyalty and the hard place of supporting a candidate with whom he had profound and extensive disagreements. As if Ryan, leader of his party’s caucus in the House of Representatives and elected Speaker of that legislative body, could have simply abandoned his own political affiliations and the things he believes in to embrace a Democratic candidate who stood for all the things he doesn’t.
This year’s GOP nominee may, indeed, have been uniquely disruptive, but Hillary Clinton was no bargain as her recent defeat by Trump amply demonstrates. Trump may have seemed awful to many on a personal level, and in terms of temperament, but Hillary, with her history of sleazy mixing of politics with self-enrichment, secretiveness and an affinity for policies that promised a third Obama term was hardly a credible alternative for principled Republicans like Ryan. So why would  the Times condemn sticking with one’s party and one’s principles?
Continuing in their prematurely triumphalist rhetoric – rejoicing in what they clearly saw as an impending GOP collapse in the wake of an anticipated Clinton romp to the White House – the Times continued:
“If Mr. Trump is rejected on Tuesday, the nation will have a momentary breather. And some good news to build on. The Republicans who have spent the last weeks and months jumping on, then off, then on the Trump bus will have been discredited, and some may be unseated. Those in the Trump inner circle will be freshly disgraced, and perhaps go away – like Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor, now Mr. Trump’s conspiracy ghoul, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has been separately brought low in an unrelated courtroom drama.” But as events showed, it was too early for such schadenfreude from the Times.
For the New York Times, as for so many on the “progressive” left of which they are the more or less official mouthpiece these days, the problem with Trump wasn’t Trump but the Republican Party itself. Referring to what they expected would be the post election situation with Hillary Clinton preparing to take the oath of office, the editorial staff at the Times added: “This country’s problems will still be deep and complex, and the Republicans in Congress show no signs of giving Mrs. Clinton any more respect than they gave President Obama, or of abandoning their jihad against responsible governing.”
Jihad? Disgraced? Have these editorialists forgotten the intense disrespect and obstructionism shown by Democrats to the two former Bush presidents not so long ago? Do they imagine that only a Democratic president is worthy of respect from all Americans? To the extent the Times sees the problem with this recent election as the GOP, itself, and not as the rise of a presidential candidate who channeled the anger of many voters feeling disenfranchised by a triumphalist left wing pushing its agenda by extra-constitutional means (through executive orders and agency rule-making outside the supervision of an elected congress), that paper’s writers have surely lost touch with the country at large. Nor can they ever speak to many of us by exulting in the humiliation and defeat of a party in which so many Americans have found a political home.
Reading that jeremiad against Republicans, masquerading as an editorial for choosing the Democratic nominee, I was prompted in my heart of hearts to choose Trump on Election Day myself, even though I had been a confirmed NeverTrumper almost since he first showed up on the primary circuit last summer. After all, why would anyone follow the recommendations of a newspaper that clearly despises and disdains the principles they favor, treating their side in the current political debates as just so much undeserving trash?
And though I resisted the temptation to cast my vote for Trump in the end, I can’t honestly say I’m sorry he won — or that so many Republicans who were uneasy with him, perhaps nearly as much as I was, apparently came home to their party’s nominee in the end.
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Stuart W. Mirsky, a former New York City official and long time Republican activist in Queens, NY, is the author of several books, including an historical novel about Vikings and Indians in eleventh century North America (The King of Vinland’s Saga), a Holocaust memoir about a young Jewish girl trapped in eastern Poland at the height of World War II (A Raft on the River), and a work of contemporary moral philosophy (Choice and Action) exploring the linguistic and logical underpinnings of our ethical beliefs.
